This course covers the historical period often referred to as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1877-1919). We will look at how Americans came to terms with the massive social, economic, and political dislocations wrought by the rise of “modern” America. Prominent themes include the expansion of industrial capitalism and the development of the West, the evolution of a new consumer culture, the influx of “new” immigrants and patterns of “Americanization,” middle-class social reform, the emergence of the U.S. as an imperial power, the explosion of nativist and racist sentiments, the rise of the Jim Crow South, and the political mobilization of aggrieved workers and farmers.